A Threat to U.S. Security

THE ENGINEER SHORTAGE

HPHE U.S. is currently in the grip of a shortage that Assistant Defense Secretary Donald Quarles ominously calls "potentially a greater threat to national security than any aggressor weapons known." That is the shortage of trained engineers. Just to keep pace .

with normal growth, the U.S. requires 30,000 new engineers annually; the new production burdens of the cold war require another 10,000 a year. But last year accredited U.S. schools graduated only 19,650 engineers--less than half the required number. Lacking engineers, U.S. companies have begun refusing Government research projects. Caterpillar Tractor alone turned down six armed forces contracts.

Not only is the engineer supply falling behind America's needs; it is also failing the U.S. in the military-technological race with the Soviet Union.

Last year the Russians, who produced only about 9,000 engineers in 1928, have stepped up graduations until last year 53,000 were turned out--a rate 2 1/2 times greater than that of the U.S.

Behind the U.S. engineering shortage lie a number of causes. One of the biggest is a survey made by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1949. It found that the U.S., then graduating close to 50,000 engineers a year, had too many. At the time, this was true enough. But shortly afterward, the Korean war and the boom in electronics and guided missiles transformed the picture. The industrial ratio of engineers to factory workers, which stood at one to 100 during the late '20s, has increased to one to 60, and is rising with every new automated process. But though the BLS retracted its 1949 warning, the damage was done. Says A. A. Potter, engineering dean emeritus of Purdue: "I've talked to high-school counselors no more than three weeks ago, and that BLS report was still in their minds." High-school training is another cause of the shortage. Training in the sciences and higher mathematics should begin no later than the junior year in high school. But in the last 50 years, the proportion of high-school students studying algebra has dropped from 50% to 20%, physics from 20% to 4%. Says University of Illinois Engineering Dean William Everitt: "We can't teach these boys algebra and geometry or primary physics and chemistry in the colleges." Today M.I.T. reckons one in four of its freshman engineering students to be poorly prepared, while Illinois Institute of Technology is only 60% filled for lack of properly qualified applicants.

Finally, when the comparative handful of engineering students do graduate, the U.S. swoops down and puts 10,000 yearly into uniform. This leads to the peculiar spectacle of defense officials screaming for more engineers while inducting them into the armed forces, often to serve in jobs where their skills are not fully used.

The result has been a mad scramble by U.S. companies for engineers. Teams of recruiters are swarming over every campus, wining, dining and tempting seniors with beginning salaries 36% higher than in 1949 and about 4% above last year. An engineer-to-be can consider anywhere from seven to 30 offers at salaries ranging from $320 monthly to twice that figure. One company even tried to hire M.I.T.'s entire graduating class. Zenith, in desperation, sent two executives to Holland on a shopping trip; they returned with ten good Dutch engineers. But the initial high pay gives a false impression of salaries for the long pull; ten years out of college, the average bachelor-of-science engineer earns only about $750 a month.

In the frenzied competition, it is usually the big companies that win, while small companies, which are also conducting original research, are starved for talent. Many engineering-school faculties are working intensively with secondary schools to improve their pre-engineering curriculums. Many companies are cooperating with colleges to develop training facilities--e.g., erection of a joint study center in South Windsor, Conn. to train 200 graduate students was jointly announced last week by United Aircraft Corp. and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

But the greatest contribution that industry can make toward meeting the shortage is to use engineers as they should be used, and not on marginal tasks that could be handled by lesser-trained personnel. Says F. W. Trezise, associate dean of the University of Illinois' undergraduate engineering division in Chicago: "Many companies are putting engineers in as sub-professionals in jobs which could be handled by technicians." Some experts estimate that the companies could cut in half the number of engineers they employ if they used them only for engineering jobs, stopped wasting them on drafting and lesser tasks that men without degrees could do just as well. Sooner or later, corporations will have to change their ways simply because there is no quick solution of the shortage in sight.

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